While I was off last week, the Christmas holiday was annoyed by the media-juiced "Duck Dynasty" affair.

Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the Robertson family, stars of the A&E hit show, said some things about homosexual sex in a GQ magazine interview that are not unusual, although he was indelicate in his choice of words when he explained that the sexual body parts of males and females form a logical connection. Of course, they do. That's why we keep having new generations of people.

Now, about half the country believes as Robertson does, according to a Pew poll, especially if the couple want to create new life. But a growing number of people say male-to-male or female-to-female sex is all right, too. Others just aren't sure. He expressed his point view, and people are free to agree or disagree. I'm not bothered by it.

Robertson also said some things about race that he believed to be true:

"I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field ... They're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, 'I tell you what: These doggone white people' - not a word! ... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues."

He's describing the context in which he, an extremely poor white kid with six brothers and sisters, worked in fields alongside black people who were equally poor. He didn't hear them complaining about whites. And I'm sure he didn't. Southern blacks in the 1950s knew better than to complain about whites, even poor ones, in mixed company. The South may have lost the Civil War in 1865, but that didn't sink in for about 100 years in the rebel states.

But Robertson also describes the blacks he worked with as "godly," which a man of faith would not say unless he meant it.

Robertson is not just some oaf from the backwoods near Shreveport, La. According to duckcommander.com, Robertson has a master's degree in education from Louisiana Tech University and was a teacher in Louisiana schools before returning to his first love, hunting, and eventually starting the Duck Commander company, now a multimillion-dollar business.

Robertson's views on race are the same as those I've heard hundreds of times from white Southerners and their copperhead brethren here in the North. It's comfortable for them to feel that way.

Page 2 of 2 - But I've also heard hundreds of times from blacks who grew up in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, about a far different racial atmosphere - how they got the hand-me-down books from the white schools, how their parents couldn't vote without passing impossible tests, how they couldn't go to restaurants or stay in hotels and had to use segregated restrooms, if there were any. Oh, and how it was illegal for blacks to marry whites.

Robertson, who is 67, became an adult during the key years of the civil rights struggle, when in 1963, Gov. George Wallace, Democrat of Alabama, stood at the school house door to prevent two black students from joining the Crimson Tide. And in 1963 when four black children were killed in the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.

And we could go on. But the point is, surely Robertson knew of the gross injustices being committed against blacks in the South. But everybody else knows those things, too. And yet the "blacks were happy campers in the old days" myth persists, even among smart, college-educated businessmen like Phil Robertson.